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A few things. 1. Mentioned before, but it is even worse now with the thicker walls. That corner between the island and the pocket door to the living area is both narrow and awkward. It would be even worse with a chair at the island. The space around the island is just too small. When you open the door to a dishwasher, it sticks out almost 80cm, you won't be able to pass between it and the island, you won't be able to pass between an open cupboard door and the bottom of the island. If the plan is to put the dining table in the garden room, then the space between the hall and patio doors seems wasted and I would move the packet doors back in line with the other side of the stairs to give you almost an extra metre in the kitchen. 2. You will not be able to use the projector there. I have a 5 m long room painted dark brown, including the ceiling, with a little slot window and the projector is OK in the daylight on a 2.9m wide image. In my old house with a slightly smaller screen, white ceilings and larger windows it was impossible to watch the projector in the daylight. And this was much closer to the screen. The combination of light coloured room, patio doors and projector will not work. 3. Spaces of 600mm and 500mm either side of a bed are too narrow. By the time the duvet hangs over the sides you can knock another 100mm off that. 4. Now that you have made the master bedroom larger, I would move the door to being a normal swing door next to bedroom 2 and close in the wardrobe more. Sliding doors are a pain to use relative to normal doors. It is not quite clear though as the render appears to have wardrobes there. You have a lot of room in the walk in, I would try to keep all the wardrobes in there. 5. The floorpan shows windows on 3 sides of bedroom 3. With the already limited space, a window or door on every wall will make placing furniture difficult. 6. I would make the sink area smaller in the master ensuite so it does not impinge on the entrance area in front of the shower.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! Wanting to blast the mower gearbox (other thread) I'd run out of blast medium. Someone mentioned soda crystal for blasting aluminium on another forum and that I should look up "pop bottle soda blaster". Appetite wetted I went digging for parts. After an ill fated attempt using copper tap connectors I found some heavy wall chromed steel tube. Noted that on the cheap blow gun I have the end screws out and a standard compressor fitting screws in: The compressor fitting is a pretty tight fit: I CAD'd up a 2 piece detail to encompass the pipe/compressor fitting gun: The lid of the bottle gets screwed down through the top half into the lower half and sandwiches the pipe assembly: The nearly finished article: Will it work, who knows? Think the barrel calibre might be a bit big and I'll use grit like there's no tomorrow. Also a barrel blockage could see the barrel coming off at speed!

My blockwork skills have improved a lot over the bank holiday weekend. 90 blocks placed to 3mm accuracy in height. ? I was assisted by my daugher, the site foreman with "the stick of office" (sensor pole for the laser level thingy) and the real boss on mixer duty. (It's not too different to a Kenwood Chef ) Happy days. Until I started dreaming about blocks last night. A dreadful nightmare about how they were all laid perfectly in a staircase painted by MC Escher. The timber frame boss was very cross with me because it clearly wasn't flat enough. This was shortly followed by us both being cross with the man from English Heritage who appeared from nowhere and declared it a listed building because nobody had made a real Escher staircase before... Oh well, back to work for a rest.

what about drainage?, surely you'll get water pooling in the 30mm channel? Does this post help at all, at the end is an idea I've looked into https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/2254-thermal-break-at-threshold/

The reason I asked is if you have a 2m ish carport but then make the wall between it and the utility the outside wall of the house it frees up a bit of space for the kitchen due to moving the thick insulated wall. It would also nicely line up with the bedroom wall above making the build easier. The carport area would just be like a small porch then. If you put a hot water tank and MVHR in that utility space it will never be possible to convert it into a garage, so why not just make it part of the house now. I think you are compromising the house for something that won’t happen. Also the door from the kitchen to that space would have to be an insulated outside door or you will lose considerable heat from the kitchen. I am not an expert on ASHPs but they have to be in an area with unobstructed airflow. It is just about conceivable it could go in the open carport at the front but ideally it would be at the left hand side of the house. However you only have 1m width there and an ASHP might be 400mm wide with various clearances required depending on the model. Just something worth noting.

To save yourself a lot of grief. Only install a single site stand pipe close to the SW boundary box and get your connection made to that. THEN after you have your connection, install the rest of your pipe work. Sometimes you can buy the same sort of boundary boxes cheap on ebay. I bought 3 of them. One feeds the site stand pipe, one feeds the static caravan and one feeds the house.

Yes- standard practice now is to have a 110mm waste pipe come in to the house and up through the slab. Your sink etc will drain in to these within the cupboard- usually with something like a rubber reducing thingy. You have nothing above ground. It's part of building regs here in NI, not sure about elsewhere.

Against the general opinon on here, I got the architect to supply me a drawing with a lot of required dimensions writing on it. We used a tape measure and set of the corners (insulated raft). Not rocket science!

Yellow Pages. A professional to do it for you.

Steel tape measure (class 1) and a decent 'site' quality laser level with receiver.

That will do, shame you have to buy that many, but anywhere else if you buy 1 the postage will cost you that.

I've seen it on eBay, but the postage starts to mount up

It could be an option but would have to review it in more detail to see if that would be a suitable alternative. There’d obviously be no point going down the cranked steel route if the ceilings have to come down. It’s probably more for an engineer to look into in conjunction with a builder. Perhaps you could mention it to your contacts? Are you actually in Surrey or was that the first ‘cranked frame’ link you found?

We have build to better than PH standards, U = 0.09 air tightness = 0.47 and don't have UFH and heat the house to 23C with towel rails as the main source of heating. If you are happy with 20C or less then it would be easy to heat without UFH depending on where you are in the country. There might be a problem convincing a buyer if you wish to sell the house though. We wouldn't be happy with a cool house.

Ok it makes a little more sense. The roof over the large window may have the skeilings but the front projecting part with the smaller window doesn’t have a skeiling does it? Are you only looking to convert the main roof or the front part as well? There may be an option in adopting cranked steels and supporting your new floor off that. But that also comes with its practical and cost implications.

Yes, more or less. Fire doors to all rooms that provide the protected staircase, mains linked with battery back up smoke detectors to Halls and Landings and a heat detector to the Kitchen area.

So after the roof conversion comes the DIY finish it off , Roof is on watertight and basically finished but the decorating , heating and wiring need doing still. Also decided on underfloor heating so that has added a further complication to the situation , as having to live in the house while I do all of these things

I’m still a little confused. Do your first floor rooms have skeilings along their external walls? Ceiling joists would normally connect at the rafter feet and therefore stopping the roof from spreading. Are you saying the ceiling joists do not connect and are actually positioned lower than rafter feet?

Yes, I just noticed that, the wonders of autocorrect

@AliG >By the time the cute hands over the sides you Cannock another 100mm off that. Quality . Mr iPad had an iPad?

What are the Target U values for walls, floor, ceilings, fenestration, target air tightness, have you done a thermal model looking at overheating in summer and/or informing smaller windows, shading of windows and reducing dangerous for overheating West facing glazing. integral garage is what I call an in-house winter cooling system so would try to design that out how big does an office need to be ?

Perhaps worth checking old maps to see if this was once an old roadside ditch they put a pipe in an covered over?

I'm not 100% clear where your dining table is, if in the garden room access is a little awkward for people coming from the open plan living area. Would the kitchen ar the far right work better, with more natural light and better outlook?

I will send a PM a bit later

We have a single storey gable end on our sitting room which is just over 4m high. We decided to have it 3/4 glazed to have it look a little different to the normal fully glazed gable. It also reduces heat loss as the corner of the gable faces North. The biggest installation consideration is the weight of the glazing which in our case was 6mm triple units. The installers broke one of the units carrying it from the front to the back of the house. IIRC it weighed 150kg and was unsupported.

What are your floor to ceiling heights? Why is the roof to the single storey rear element so high up? Is it to do with ceiling heights hence my comment above? There may be a slight access/design issue with the door between the Landing and Bedroom 3 assuming the front projected part is still to have the lower eaves? The line of the wall between the Landing and Bedroom 3 doesn’t appear to be shown correctly. The Landing side of that wall lines through with the internal face of the front wall to Bedroom 2 but does not line through with the internal face of the front wall to Bedroom 5. If you’re going to use the loft as storage, then you can do what you like to access it. The roof could also be designed with a slightly simpler structure. If however you’re going to use the loft for anything else that resembles a habitable area, it will need to meet BR’s in terms of structure, fire and thermal. If you are going to use the loft as habitable, you’d normally look at having four Bedroom’s on the first floor and a fifth/Games room on the top floor. Who has designed this house because in another post, you mentioned your wife is the architect or were you referring to that as her making the decisions and having the final say?

I would not use a round spiral staircase in a square "room" the old round peg in a square hole situation creating awkward corners you will never get to for cleaning etc. Make a square "spiral" staircase out of timber in the same way a timber stair can wind round a corner, it will just keep on winding like a spiral stair, but with all the treads going out to the corners. Then the space under it could be a cupboard accessed from bed 4.

Massive (f to c) is impressive.....but there isn’t much increase in light, overheating is increased, you loose thermal efficiency, useable room space & in our case it complicates weathering the cill. Does your view full the whole space? If not framing it with a smaller window might give as good or better an effect without the downsides & for less money. We have some large opening lights, the walls can create a fulcrum to overload the frame so we will need restrictors. Get the installation logistics sorted out & reliable fitters - we were delayed by 5 months over this.

To save costs in having to push back the retaining wall or have the new rear wall of the extension act as part retaining, how about extending to within 900mm of the retaining wall, which will maintain a path around?

I have done several loft conversions and never removed bedroom ceilings, I always added flooring joists between the ceiling joists raised above the plaster a little. I don’t sister existing ceiling joists as this gives rise to more noise transference. This gives maximum height within the loft conversion by keeping the floor as low as possible.

“Telebeam” is what @PeterW mentioned above ?

I recall some years ago there was a system that uses aluminium (?) sister joists. I can't remember if they were only to help convert trussed roofs or if they wern't as deep as timber joists making them useful in situations like yours. Google found one system called Telegram.. https://www.telebeam.co.uk/

Why has your SE stated all the existing ceilings need to be removed? In your normal loft conversion, the existing ceilings are retained and new floor joists are positioned between and fixed to the sides of the existing but maintaining a gap between the bottom of the new joists and existing ceiling. There may be some minor disruption and localised re-decorating but that’s generally the extent of the disruption. If you have a height of 2350mm from the top of the floor boards/deck to the underside of the apex, then you should have room to achieve a complaint conversion by the time you’ve upgraded the floor joists and rafters. If you said this dimension was 2200mm, then I’d suggest to not bother, unless of course there was scope to replace and re-pitch the roof.

First off you need to work out your heat loss for your project as its impossible to guess a boiler size accurately on the info you have supplied. Your hot water demand sounds like it could be high so I personally would be looking at a 300l UVC. Get as much PV as possible and excess electric produced by PV is pretty easily diverted to the hot water via solar diverter (bought or DIY unit) but has no benefit to your heating side (with a standard boiler UVC set up). Do your sums and dont rite of ashp just yet but I would concentrate on getting your energy usage down on the building first. A few extra pounds just now spent on the fabric of the building will be saving you money way down the line.

Hi, I am guessing it is 5 bedrooms plus an open plan living area as otherwise it seems a lot to fit into 180m2. It could be that your hot water needs are the most important, especially if well insulated. Do you foresee multiple showers being used simultaneously as that will make a difference. A 10m shower is around 100l of water and a bath around 100-150l depending on how big it is. Assuming you are storing water at 60C and using it at 40C then the amount of hot water required for a couple of showers or a shower and a bath is maybe 120l. Thus the usual size of UVC in this size of house would probably be 200-250l. If you thought 3 showers/baths could be used at once then I might up it to 300l. This has some quite useful information on UVCs. http://www.thermsaver.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Thermsaver-Excelsior-Brochure-2015.pdf If you have a bath and a shower a 250l UVC is going to need about 25 minutes to get back up to temperature using 20kW of heat input. This is why you need a larger UVC so that the water isn't totally cooled down by the cold input as you use it. If you expect to use more water than this in one go you need a larger UVC. So I would say you are probably looking at 250l and possibly 300l if you plan to use a lot of water at one time. This will have a 20kW coil so I would expect you to need a 30kW gas boiler so that you can heat the house and hot water at the same time. Gas boilers are a lot less sensitive to being sized correctly than ASHPs. If you aren't going to be a heavy water user I would consider an ASHP, I am not sure how the costs are with LPG. As to PV you may limited by the amount of south facing roof you have, I would perhaps figure that out first. You will be able to generate around 200W per square metre of panel. They take up a lot of room. The standard used to be to go for 4kW, most people probably end up between 2.5 and 5kW depending on space, costs and whether or not it pays for itself in electricity savings.

So I have reached the point where I need to start first fix plumbing. After reading about manifold systems on this forum have decided that is the way forward. Is Hep 20 a good choice? I have a plumber who will help me, he said Hep 20 barrier pipe was too floppy for the bar mixer showers. He also said I might struggle to make the 90deg turn within the studwall, was trying to avoid having any hidden joints, so really don't want an elbow behind the tiles in the studwall. He suggested using a MLCP pipe as it holds it shape better. Or converting to copper for the stubs that stick thru the wall, but this would also mean a joint behind the tiles. What have people used? I was thinking bar mixers as easy to change in the future and a lot better value than using remote diverts like Hansgrohe I box thing. Was going to use Hep20 for everything, except UFH which is coming from Wunda.

I've added a couple of other options: E - ProDave's suggestion F - On front elevation of utility near where house consumer unit likely to be I've also added drain routes. I'm hoping it's not an issue to pass under a surface or foul water drain. If not only A, B and options.

Morning all. I’ve got the shell of the house up and really need to sort out the nitty gritty of how the place is going to work. I have had a couple of guys at the house looking at all the different methods of how we will heat the place and supply hot water. Now it has been so long since I started looking into all this that I’ve gone around and around until I have tied my brain up in knots. So I would like a Forums idiot guide to ASHP. What I think I know, ashp is a metal box that works like an air conditioner in reverse. So does this box of magic have a cold feed going into it and after the magic has happened hot water comes out of it ??. The hot coming out needs to go somewhere, where’s this go ?? the temperature coming out is ok for ufh, but not hot enough for a bath or shower ??. how do you get it hotter ??? i have purposely asked some basic questions, some I know the answers to, but I thought by going back to basics I might get a better grip on what I’m trying to do. I have hundreds more questions but I hope this gets the ball rolling so I can ask some more equally silly ones. Stay safe out there. Russ.

I'm no heat pump expert, but, my understanding is over a short period you are correct (avoid short cycling), but over the long period you do want it to turn off as much as possible during each day If it keeps stopping and starting every minute it will not reach maximum efficiency. And it should be set to the lowest water temperature that works. But beyond those constraints, you want it to turn off for as many hours as possible each day to save power overall , if this makes sense? Congratulations on this. How did you go about buying it from Italy? On internet, and what price? Thank you and welcome!

FWIW, our Carrier ASHP is also really sensitive to flow rate. The water pump on ours is a three speed one, so it can be adjusted as one way to try and stop it tripping out on low flow, but the thing that finally fixed the low flow error trips was fitting an adjustable pressure bypass valve. This opens a "short circuit" between flow and return if the pressure in the flow pipe is momentarily too high (the ASHP seems to sense flow rate indirectly by measuring pressure) and by opening it lowers the flow pressure and stops the ASHP tripping out. It needed a bit of fiddling about to get it to work, though. The cause in our case was that the ASHP is running UFH, and the actuators take a fair time to open when the system is turned on, so the ASHP is initially working against a heavy flow restriction. I changed the main actuator valve to a Salus temperature controlled servo operated one, that helps, as it only takes about 30 seconds or so to open, but that's still a bit marginal, as the ASHP seems to trip out after about 20 seconds or so, as far as I can tell.

I have drawers and drawers of them, just about every value going, and capacitors and transistors etc etc etc.

F u c k o f f a n d g r o u t s o m e t h I n g ! ??

Is it the bell end that's the main problem?